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Jared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.

I just wondered why the Statcounter site showed without and images or stylesheets... Then I remembered that it was completely blocked in AdBlock. Because it's a nasty dirty disgusting privacy-raping piece of shit of a tracking site!

I would see their statistics as more than useless, as everyone with half a brain already blocks them and their nasty friends.

I thought the same thing at first, until I RTFA (I know I know, shame on me). IE6 is the dominate IE version, ahead of both IE7 and IE8 (individually). If Windows 98 were the dominate Windows version today, then OSX surpassing it in usage share certainly would not be "much ado about nothing".

The thing is, most people see Internet Explorer as 'The Internet', in much the same way that they see Ms Windows as 'The computer'. I mean, I installed Firefox on a parents laptop, and they're first worry was that they wouldn't be able to find their favourite website 'because it was a different internet'.
People who don't grasp this concept will never see a reason to upgrade, and unfortunately, this means a silent majority of PC users probably never will.

The only reason IE is still as high as it is, is because 99% of the people using it don't know there is an alternative.
Heck, it isn't that hard to get people to switch. If I can get my SEVENTY SIX YEAR OLD father to switch to Firefox (he calls it Mozilla LOL),
then you can get anyone to switch.

They might see Internet Explorer as "The Internet", but this is behavior that can easily be changed. My company actually had to block Google Chrome (not a decision I agree with, mind you) because too many people were installing it (somehow without knowing what they were doing) and then reporting problems with our Intranet*. When we asked what browser they were using, they wouldn't know but when pressed they would say "I'm using The Google Internet." Their view of IE as "The Internet" was easily changed t

Versions of IE before IE4 were actually called "The Internet" on the desktop and had an icon of a globe and a magnifying glass.

No other major browser has the word "Internet" in its name, and if it did Microsoft could probably sue for trademark violation. No doubt calling their browser "Internet Explorer" instead of "Web Explorer" to take advantage of the then-more-well-known term "Internet" over "Web" worked out well for them. They may have actually propagated continued confusion of the two terms by doing

I don't like to feed trolls normally but I do wonder that if T. Rolland McFlamebait over here had posted something akin to "The thing is, most Chinese see Internet Explorer as 'The Internet'" people would find it less acceptable. It seems, at least to me and maybe I _am_ biased, that it's often fine to beat-up on Americans or use the convenient stereotype without the racist connotations that would be associated were you talking about another culture or people.

I really don't think it's that bad. It is acceptable to mock majority groups with power because they cann't be described as being oppressed. It's just not the same for minority groups as they will be uncertain enough about their place already. It's just a case of show a little empathy. And that's before you bring the tangled mess of history into it. If you're a adult, male, white, middle-class, heterosexual and well-educated, in the west at least, you are at such a tremendous advantage (because those with p

As a member of one of those "groups who have the power" I (as an individual) don't feel very powerful, wealthy or in control of much of anything.
And I resent being called the cause of some other group's problems, simply because I look like someone who might have done something bad to their ancestors.

As a member of one of those "groups who have the power" I (as an individual) don't feel very powerful, wealthy or in control of much of anything.

Go visit a slum some day, then tell me again how difficult your life is. Trust me, you have plenty of power and wealth. But, like so many other Slashdot nerds, your worldview is so narrow (probably thanks to a lifetime spent in a basement) that you don't even realize it. Which is probably while libertarianism is so popular around here...

Here's one. How would you explain the same exact situation in one place where it is seemingly blatantly by color of skin, where there is no significant differences in color of skin?

Poverty and slums and ghettos are fairly universal thoughout the world, and very rarely does it matter what color of skin one has, compared to others.

In Africa, there are whole regions where black on black power struggles occur, and the minority is not that significantly different than the majority.

The point I'm making, is that it isn't color of skin that is the cause, it is just something to distract from the REAL cause, man's inhumanity to man.

The worst propgators of this are not the white Anglo Christian heterosexual males (Most aren't Anglo btw), but the self hating race baiters like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright.

They do nothing to resolve the issue of man's inhumanity to man, and turn any dialogue into self fulfilling prophecies.

Whenever you have people pitting one group against another group, it is nothing short of hatred. PERIOD.

Yes, I've been to slums around the world. They are all around the world, and the only thing in common is that you have one group of people being pitted against another, without regard to individuality, and rarely does it have anything to do with "race".

Libertarians don't care about power, or authority, except for that of the individual. Power accumulated into groups is where the problems truly lie. The problem with people like yourself, is that they see power in terms of groups of people, and yet seek solutions by grouping people for power consolidation, which really is the problem in the first place.

True libertarians realize the catch22 nature of using groups to isolate individuals from the power of self.

THAT is why libertarianism is popular around here, as it is about liberty of all people, not just the groups you belong to.

Poverty and slums and ghettos are fairly universal thoughout the world, and very rarely does it matter what color of skin one has, compared to others.

And that right there is where you lost me. This statement is utterly absurd. Poverty is very often linked to ethnicity *specifically* because ethnic groups are targeted. Are are you going to try and convince me that ghettos in the US aren't predominantly non-anglo?

In fact, that's the whole fucking point. As a white person, your parents, and their grandpare

I'd maybe add that you can make fun of your own peer group, i.e. gay jokes by gays, Jew jokes by jews... don't bother me. I remember once during a one-woman-show trying to imagine it was a guy on stage... the girl was hilarious, I'd have docked a guy for the same spiel.

That's hardly accurate. The accurate thing to say is that there's a grossly disproportionate amount of harm done. An adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well educated person has all of his rights and can definitely get help if somebody is harassing him. In the case of the former it's hardly worth wasting time or energy on as it's not like we're going to have a vote on his rights.

Whereas a lesbian, jewish, old, female from Ghana probably doesn't have full access to the legal system

The fact is that MOST people in former soviet republic countries dont even *use* Internet Explorer, which makes the poster I replied to demonstrably myopic. Sure, maybe he isnt from America after all, but that doesnt change the fact that most of the world isnt stuck on Internet Explorer. IE usage is below 50% worldwide. Thats a fact. He begins with incorrect bullshit.

Not true, my mother thinks the same, she's swedish. My gf's british parents thought the same (until I reeducated them - they still insists on ie because they can run all their weird flashgames and what not in ie - yes their computer crawls with viruses and trojans, one feels slightly dirty after using it)

The gap between Firefox (all versions) and IE (all versions) is also rather narrower for Europe than for North America.

Yeah, but there's something worth considering. I'm from Poland, which boasts FF leadership over IE (I am an Opera user myself but still) and there's something I realized, thinking about Poland's (and other Central European countries') results and also the massive Opera market share in Russia. Thing is, these are the countries with lower Internet penetration than North America. You have considerably moms and dads online, not to mention grannies and grandpas than, say, in the States. It's only natural that a

No, that doesn't explain it. Poland actually has relatively high Internet penetration. Developing countries on the other hand seem to be much more dependant on Internet Explorer, although this might have something to do with the popularity of Internet Cafés rather than a home connection.

What's interesting is that Opera actually has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE (and not just a single version).

I'm not sure why you'd find that more interesting than the fact that Chrome passed Safari or whatever.

The only thing I can think of that means anything in this whole "browser wars" thing, and it doesn't mean as much now as it did 4 years ago, is how vital it is to absolutely stick to web standards as a result of cross browser compliance. Otherwise, it's pretty much irrelevant. My phone has a webkit browser fully integrated into it, so when I hit the web with it, I'm probably being detected as using Safari

You know what? Web developers act so surprised when you tell them Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser on the planet. Not some "stat counter" stuff, professional companies will give you those stats. Last time I checked, it was like 40%.

So, when you ignore that fact and don't support Opera Mini and Nokia S60 browser (which is Webkit), support only iPhone with some m.something.com , you ignore about 100-150 million people who either has J2ME or Symbian/S40 in their hands, perhaps richer than iPhone u

I noticed many sites seem to have abandoned IE6 support completely. (Using ie 6 and 7 in virtualized XP for testing stuff)

This is how it should be. No CSS hacks, just IE6 users seeing the bugs that arise through their usage of the browser.And for corporate users who HAVE to use ie6, for the nicest value of "they can fuck off"; they can fuck off.

IE6 is the only website browser that should be around.
I don't know what all this buzz is about that Firefork website viewer thing, or that Oprah browser. I knew she did a talk show and all but web browsers? Get off my interwebs!"

Seriously considering this as my next signature."Trying to get your website to work correctly in IE6 is like a puzzle game! Challenging and fun!"

What this article tells me is that a quarter of the internet users are still using a web browser that was released on August 27, 2001. From a peak market share of %95, it has only come down to %23 in eight years (and change). This survival is against massive "IE6 must die" campaigns, introduction of fairly decent, and standards compliant (comparatively) browsers such as Firefox, Chrome the ever improving Safari and the somehow still surviving gem named Opera.

I was hoping that the rise of social applications like Facebook, Youtube, Digg and popular business applications such as the ones made by 37signals would put an end, a final nail in the coffin if you like, to this monster from the digital stone age.

But obviously I was, surely together with a whole bunch of other fellow/.'ers, wrong. Obviously, the failure of adaptation of Vista played some role in this outcome. But seeing that building a better (faster, compliant, etc.) browser is not the answer, I'm now genuinely hoping that Windows 7 will massively succeed so that we can put an end to this abomination.

Unfortunately many/most people do not use social networking sites, and if they do, they don't necessarily have friends who care about browser versions. Any IE6 must die campaign should be supported by the actual websites themselves, telling users they need to upgrade directly on the page.

What would be good is a small bit of script people can embed in their page, which tells IE 6 users to upgrade to something more recent by outputting a bar above the top of the page which tells them what to do. Kind of like

I still use IE6 in the very few cases I have to use an internet explorer browser. That amounts to less than 0.01% of my browsing; all sites that require IE to work are compatible to IE6 so no reason to upgrade because I don't use it for anything else.

As an additional bonus I get the pleasure of knowing that I am forcing web designers to do extra work to support legacy. That means more people needed in IT.

What this article tells me is that a quarter of the internet users are still using a web browser that was released on August 27, 2001. From a peak market share of %95, it has only come down to %23 in eight years (and change). [...]

That's telling us something about the replacement cycle for Windows PCs. As discussed on Slashdot before, few private citizens will upgrade a browser on a "working" machine.

IE8 is available for Windows XP, your point is moot. If users wanted to upgrade they could.

Most modern operating systems also have a web browser, shipping without one is not a wise choice. As illustrated, it also allows third parties to rely on there already being a rendering engine for such things available (or I have even seen documention ship as html).

Ditto here, and the corporate machines are under-specced for all the extra background junk they put on them. Being forced in to IE6 would be terrible if I didn't have a development machine with Linux on it, but I think Office 2003 (or OpenOffice on our dev machines) is preferable to 2007!

The Ars Technica stats broadly mirrors my own humble blog, I would guess that the techie crowd breaks down 5::2::2::1 Firefox::Safari::IE::Chrome across the board. If this assumption is true, I find it strange that Chrome is not as popular as Safari among the technical people whereas in the general stats they are almost neck-and-neck although less popular overall.

Personally I think that having 4 browsers with significant share (or 6 if you count IE6 and IE7 as separate, incompatible browsers) is very healthy. For a while it looked like it was going to be IE6 stamping on the face of the web forever, but now the population is fragmented web sites have to designed with proper standards in mind.

Chrome would be my browser of choice were it not for the lack of Adblock, Noscript & IETab; I suspect a lot of other techies feel the same way, which is why Chrome has stayed with such a modest share despite early interest in it.

I can't speak for Safari as every time I've tried to use it (On Windows) I've ended up hating it.

According to my Google Analytics page, only 4.5% of Safari users were using the Windows version. In some ways I think that is a shame - I like the way Safari renders pages, it does a much better job of smoothing fonts and graphics than the other browsers. Plus it is very quick (although Chrome starts up faster) and the web inspector tools incredibly useful.

my guess would be that very few mac people use chrome, while people who would otherwise be using safari on windows are using chrome instead due to the absolutely horrible first three or four versions apple released. i think it may be somewhat stable now, but those first few releases crashed so often i started wondering if they'd dug up an engineer from Mac OS 8.5 to work on the thing.

What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one. If you look only at oldest versions, only newer versions, or all versions together, IE has a solid lead over Firefox in all three categories. I'm not sure about the significance of this, as IE6 being at over 23% share, most sites still to support it for the foreseeable future.

What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.

These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones. The usage of Firefox 1 and 2 for example is virtually nothing, while 3.5 is the most popular version. So "all versions of Firefox" actually mean "mostly Firefox 3.5, a bit Firefox 3 and really nothing else", while "all of Internet Explorer" means "Mostly IE6, some IE7 and some IE8".

You are absolutely right that all versions combined, IE is still very dominant, but IE-users are way less inclined to upgrade to more recent versions. Just like Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing with Microsoft Office. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to sell their latest products anymore. This is why it quite significant that Firefox with it's latest product is able to have more market share than Microsoft with it's old version, because the old versions of Microsoft products are the relevant ones.

I think what has done MS in is they did some fairly major user facing changes in all their main product offerings. The ribbon in Office, the look and tabs of IE 7-8, the gui, layout of stuff and UAC in Vista etc. People just pretty much said can't I do that with IE 6, Office 2003, XP and people said yeah you can but IE8 Office 2007 and Vista/Win 7 are so much prettier. This was followed by "who cares", and at least in business with "so I'm going to spend all this money and retrain staff and redevelop intern

A much heard argument for not upgrading IE6 to something more up to date is the fact a lot of legacy intranet applications don't seem to work with anything else than IE6. I wonder if this will prevent businesses from adopting Windows 7 as well, as IE6 is not available for that platform.

What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one.

It's also something that varies by region. Looking at browser versions in Europe, Firefox 3 is on the heels of IE 7, and well ahead of IE 6, which is then followed by Opera 9.6 and Firefox 2. Safari, Chrome, and Opera 9.2 are well behind. Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 are not differentiated, nor are sub-versions of IE 6. Opera 10 and IE 8 do not show yet - they are probably bundled in the "others" category.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar [statcounter.com]

It is quite relevant, because IE6 is actually the most used browser in the world. Despite the release of newer versions of Internet Explorer, none of them have caught on enough to change that situation.

This is radically different with all other browsers, where the lastest versions are also the most popular versions of the product.

Still, even going on those old figures, IE7 and 8 combined make up 36%, so I'm not sure why you think they haven't caught on.

You are right when you say that combining the usage of different versions of Internet Explorer results in quite hefty market share. But not a single version of IE is more popular than version 6. And now Firefox (yes, versions combined) is now popular than every single version of IE, including the most popular version 6.

The article isn't stating Firefox is now more popular than IE, because obviously Microsoft still holds a very dominant position in the browser market. The interesting thing is that the most p

I found a solution to that problem a couple of years back. When I first put OpenPisteMap [openpistemap.org] online, I got a lot of complaints from people that it didn't work in IE6. I don't have any Windows machines and I'm not about to buy and install Windows to test it in an 8 year old browser. So I added a note to the website that IE6 users see that basically says "I know it doesn't work in IE6 - if you can fix it, send me a patch". The complaints suddenly stopped. I didn't get sent any patches either, so I guess the

I'm guessing that the intersection of "IE6 users" and "People capable of patching websites into compliance with IE6" is fairly small and (perhaps more importantly) is largely composed of people who have to do that for their day job and don't even want to think about it on their own time.

This is great, but IE6 is still going to stick around for years. The reasons - as have been widely discussed on these pages before - are:

Large corporations can't be bothered with the cost and hassle of updating thousands of machines when IE6 is supposedly 'good enough' and doesn't break internal applications which were built on top of its many quirks.

Many, many home users don't know what a browser is or don't realise that there are alternatives. These people aren't stupid (well, most of them anyway) - they just don't care enough about tech to know the options.

Neither of these situations will change any time soon. Gradual adoption of Windows 7 will certainly help in the second case, but the first one is dependent entirely on enterprise-level IT departments creating lots of work (and therefore cost) for themselves when senior management can't see any tangible benefit... And how soon do you think that will happen?

What you say is true. However, the reason we care about browser market shares isn't (in general) evangelical fervor; but concern for web development, features used by web sites, HTML5 vs. Flash, etc, etc. For that reason, what we really care about is not "How many people are using browser X vs. browser Y?" but "How much influence on web development/deployment of new web technologies does browser X or browser Y have?"

Large corporate installations are highly change averse; but they also tend to be unsuppor

Here are the stats for the company web site for the company I work for. It's a smallish Nordic company, and it's a safe bet that 95% of all visits are from other people at work. (I have no proof of that figure, obviously, but trust me when I say that looking at our site isn't something people do on their free time.)

Really? I worked as a dev at a company who liked their MS technology and were one of the first (if not the first) in the UK to have a.Net powered intranet. The majority of us devs used Firefox and found it easier than IE since you could even use the quick bookmarks to get to specific numbered articles/tickets. That probably was still back in the days of IE6, though.

Now I get to use a different Sharepoint site, hosted by Microsoft, and it works flawlessly in Firefox on Fedora Linux [i]except[/i] when I need

Quite a lot (or even most?) of our visitors are big industrial companies, utilities, government agencies etc. It is quite accurate to describe them as working in tightly controlled environments.

I know for a fact that the website does work in FF, as that is what I use. The relatively high number of Wgets is from automated "screen scrapers" and similar applications. We have quite a lot of data that some organizations probably get this way. Also, we use awstats for the stats, but I can't guarantee that it is

I have a (PC) gaming-related site. To my knowledge, the amount of IT-expert visitors isn't higher than among the general population, but obviously people who play PC games at least see the PC as something more than just a Web access device. So, over the last 6 months, I'm showing

Firefox 37%IE 35%Chrome 15%Safari 6%Opera 5%

Note that Chrome's share here is definitely higher than its overall market share. Also, IE6 is also quite unpopular. Out of IE's 35%, IE8 is 13%, IE7 is 17% with IE6 at a bit under 4%.

IE 6 is dropping fast, but a very poor showing for Opera and Safari. The OS stats are dominated by Windows XP (62%) and Vista (33%), with OS X and other flavours of Windows taking the remaining few percent. No Linux at all sadly.

A company I worked for had similar similar browser-share for their major web applications, and it really had little to do with Opera and Safari being niche outcast browsers. It had a lot more to do with the site being so broken as to be unusable in Opera and Safari. People would go one or two pages in, realize there was a problem, and either switch to a different browser, or as the growing fear was, switch to a different company.

It stems from the complaint above that many large corporate IT departments don't want to switch from IE6. Well, guess what the in-house web developers code for first? IE6. Then they try to tweak the design to work passably in other browsers when they should be working the other way: create a standards-based layout, then tweak for the peccadillos of other browsers.

My websites and our client's websites have been showing Firefox passing up IE6, IE7, and IE8 combined. IE typically shows around 38%, Firefox shows around 39% and all others (mix of Chrome, Safari, Opera and mobile browsers) make up the difference. It's like it 1997 all over again. I'm kind of excited about the whole thing [blogspot.com] because now the new crop of standards can come to the front faster (SVG, HTML 5, etc...).

Maybe we can compare how much technically savvy are the users of different sites by looking at the share of different browsers. We can compare the data of Ars with the data of w3schools [w3schools.com] (monthly data since 2002).

W3S's share of Firefox is larger that all the IE's together. FF overtook IE at about the beginning of this year.

I don't try to be sarcastic. Each IE 6 losing its "default browser status" is good for MS especially for their image. They "won" the browser wars already, some developers working for their rivals can't dream about MS Windows without MS HTML engines/objects. Even Big Blue relies on IE in certain jobs so they need "IE 6 compatibility" mode.

IE 7 and 8 incompatibility/quirks serve in the place of IE 6 now, why should MS really bother? Outdated browser which is bad for their security/performance image is being r

This is definitely not news for our company website. Don't know how well it reflects the rest of the world, but I'm quite surprised so many are still using IE6 in the first place.

Our stats show 24.25% using Firefox and 65.12% using various version of IE. (The rest going to Safari, Chrome etc. Interestingly, Safari and Chrome are almost neck and neck at 4.20 and 4.11% respectively.)

Of the 65.12% using IE, 27.11% of those are using version 6. That's 17.65% total, if my maths is any good. It's not dying (w

But then again, the browser market is quite different now than it was a few years ago, because large corporations like Google and Apple have hit the scene and Opera became an actual free browser. So while IE6 market share has been declining for years, they haven't all switched to the same product. There used to be only two or three major browsers out there, but in these days you can be the biggest player out there by having a little over 20% market share.

People are making comparisons to IE6 because its market share is still relevant and affects the state of the web as a whole. For example, developments like Google Wave simply aren't possible on IE6 (at least without the somewhat controversial Chrome Frame plugin), so IE6 is hindering the adoption of new technology. Additionally, IE6's endless list of quirks cause untold lost hours of devlopment time for web developers worldwide.

Once IE6 drops down to a negligible percentage it means that many developers can